It's pleasing to turn other people's discarded crap into something creative but also depressing. It really should not be so easy to find this trash but the roadsides around where we live are smothered by all the rubbish that people have deliberately thrown there. And there's so ****ing much of it.
Jumping Girl - This is the only one I've done with motion and I didn't quite get it right as her hat doesn't go up when she jumps!
I grew up in the UK at the peak of the "Keep Britain Tidy" campaign and that attitude stuck firmly in my head even 50 years later. Compared to other problems it may seem trivial but it does reveal a mindset and causes some problems, particularly with waterways. The big floods in Bangkok in 2011 were made worse by the drainage system having been bunged up by plastic waste. But on a daily basis I just wish people would have a bit more pride in looking after where they live and pass through. Thailand still seems to live in an age where things were wrapped in banana leaves and discarding them was no problem, but now it's single-use plastic instead.
Anyway, I now cycle around collecting some of this roadside trash, wash it a little when I get back home then collage it into whatever takes my fancy. This seems to be human characters at the moment with faces being the focus.
Recent building sites are one of the best places to find this trash. Builders are not the tidiest of folk and after we moved into our new house I was finding rusty wire and worn out tools around the garden for months. Another good place is hotspots for road accidents. I feel a bit like a vulture as I keep going back to a particular bend in a local road where minor collisions seem to forever replenish the supply of shattered vehicle lights lying around.
Windy Day Woman - I really like her "Marilyn Monroe" skirt which took me ages to get it to look like it was being blown up.
Party Boy - I think he just likes stamping on the balloons mainly.
Plastic Rubbish - part of my collection of forever interesting plastic scraps.
I don't keep what I make except in the form of a photograph. I have probably put more effort into getting the photography as good as I can than in either the trash-collecting or the creating.
In making these collages I have found that however careful I am and however many times I re-check what I have put together I always find something wrong when I look at the photo. Sometimes I'll re-do it, sometimes I'll just shrug my shoulders.
Loving Couple - I think I could have found something better for his eyes and his shirt buttons are not in line. I do like her hair, though.
This is a fun little hobby that I have recently returned to. I first tried it almost ten years ago but back then I had the idea of photographing each individual piece of trash, isolating it in Photoshop and then putting the collage together digitally. It was a lot of work but the advantages were being able to resize bits to better fit and also copy and paste to have more than one of the same piece. It kind of worked but always suffered from having a strange look without the natural shadows that each piece of scrap throws on the others. So this time around the creating is all physical.
Bottle cap snake - done in the old style of putting it together digitally so you can see certain caps used several times and that the shading looks very artificial.
Old Couple - I like this old one for its simplicity but dislike the Photoshop drop shadows I used.
Rusty Metal Squares - an abstract showing the richness of colour and texture available in our trash. Again, you can see that most of these were used more than once.
Some works in progress - it would probably help if I organised my piles!
